A much less crappy SIMON update

on November 16, 2011at 11:26 pm

When I started doing the Simon comic, I had some fairly clear ideas about how I wanted to go about it. One of which was to use grey tones for shading (those little black dots that, when viewed from a distance, will blend to create the illusion of solid shades of grey). Regretfully, after a while it became apparent that grey tones didn’t fit the style I was aiming for and, furthermore, wouldn’t be able to facilitate the level of visual detail that is required as the comic progresses.

Because of this, I have decided to switch tracks and do the comic in full color. This, of course, means going back and coloring in the pages that have already been done in grey tones (a process that, while not entirely “time-consuming”, takes a bit longer than just doing it in color in the first place).

So, with that in mind, I thought I would go ahead and give you a sample of what one of the pages would’ve looked like, versus what it looks like now.

First, we have the page in grey tones.

As you have probably noticed, one of the difficulties with grey tones and webcomics is that, while the blending effect works great in print, the limitations of computer monitors trying to adapt to the resolution of the small dots tends to create odd patterns. These patterns can change depending on the magnification of the image (ie, this effect will usually change if you zoom in or out).